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Erasing fear memories

Fearful memories can be wiped out for at least a year using a drug-free technique, according to a study done in USA. The technique exploits the way that human brains store and recall memories. When a long-term memory is recalled, it goes through a brief period of vulnerability, after which it must be stored anew to be remembered again. While the memory is in its fragile state, it can be modified or disrupted. Studies in animals have used drugs to interfere with this reconsolidation process, stirring hope for therapies to blunt the haunting memories associated with conditions such as post-traumatic stress disorder. These experiments have helped to understand reconsolidation, although a study done earlier this year in humans used a drug that can treat high blood pressure, called propranol... Read more »

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Changing Fear Memories | Penn State Harrisburg

Her findings about erasing fear memories were published in the journal Nature, and she is the recipient of the NYAS Blavatnik Award for Young Scientists.

http://harrisburg.psu.edu/calendar/event/changing-fear-memories

Erasing Fears By Thinking About Them : NPR

Dec 11, 2009 · Fearful memories can be updated — and the fear erased — without drugs, a new study in the journal Nature suggests. Study author Elizabeth Phelps, a ...

These types of fear memories, like those associated with PTSD, are notoriously difficult to erase in adulthood. Even after shocks are discontinued for months, the sound of a tone triggers extreme anxiety-like behavior in conditioned mice. Fear extinction ...

Scientists are one step closer to understanding how to erase painful fear memories by successfully erasing them in a small group of people, according to a study published Thursday in the journal Science. The intervention requires no drug, acting through ...

But in mice (and, importantly, in some people with severe PTSD), this extinction therapy only works for recently acquired fear memories. If a fear memory is old, then no amount of retraining will erase the animal’s fear. “One of the major challenges in ...

(PhysOrg.com) -- Researchers working with mice have discovered that by removing a protein from the region of the brain responsible for recalling fear ... memory erasure. “This may sound like science fiction, the ability to selectively erase memories ...

Phys.org •
8 years ago

http://phys.org/news/2010-11-erase-memory.html

Rewriting memories to erase fear

NYU (US)—Researchers have developed a non-invasive technique to block the return of fear memories in humans. The technique could lead to new ways to treat anxiety disorders. Fear memories are expressed as the body’s emotional reaction to objects …

Futurity •
9 years ago

http://www.futurity.org/rewriting-memories-to-erase-fear/

Researchers erase, then restore memories in rats

At the same time as stimulating the nerve, the researchers administered an electric shock to the rat's foot -- leading the rat to associate the nerve stimulation with pain, and react with fear. Then, the team set about erasing the memory of that fear.

Emotional memories last ... common medication propranolol — a member of the beta-blocker class normally used to treat hypertension — can erase the fearful element of an emotional memory. Recently, researchers discovered that fear memories in rats ...

Erasing memories has long been a staple of sci-fi films, but researchers now believe they have made a breakthrough in making the process reality. The groundbreaking research at Uppsala University in Sweden could lead to radical new treatments for …

But scientists have laid a foundation with their discovery that proteins can be removed from the brain's fear center to erase memories forever ... says permanently erasing memories in humans, if it can be done, wouldn't be a lot different ethically ...

“Memory”, wrote ... Ledoux’s memory-erasing experiment to humans. Psychologists have known for some time that it is difficult to treat fearful memories with therapy. Humans, like rats, can be trained in a laboratory to fear an innocuous stimulus ...